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The Academy of American Poets is the largest membership-based nonprofit organization fostering an appreciation for contemporary poetry and supporting American poets. For over three generations, the Academy has connected millions of people to great poetry through programs such as National Poetry Month, the largest literary celebration in the world; Poets.org, the Academy’s popular website; American Poets, a biannual literary journal; and an annual series of poetry readings and special events. Since its founding, the Academy has awarded more money to poets than any other organization.

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Poet and essayist Sherod Santos was born on September 9, 1948 in Greenville, South Carolina.

He is the author of numerous books of poetry, including The Intricated Soul: New and Selected Poems (W. W. Norton & Co., 2010), The Perishing (2003); The Pilot Star Elegies (1999), which won a Theodore Roethke Poetry Prize and was both a National Book Award Finalist and one of five nominees for The New Yorker Book Award; The City of Women (1993); The Southern Reaches (1989); and Accidental Weather (1982), which was selected for the National Poetry Series.

In 2000, the University of Georgia Press published A Poetry of Two Minds, a collection of his essays.

His awards include the Delmore Schwartz Memorial Award, the "Discovery"/The Nation Award, the Oscar Blumenthal Prize from Poetry magazine, a Pushcart Prize in both poetry and the essay, and the 1984 appointment as Robert Frost Poet at the Frost house in Franconia, New Hampshire. He has also received fellowships from the Ingram Merrill and Guggenheim foundations, and the National Endowment for the Arts.

From 1990 to 1997, Santos served as external examiner and poet-in-residence at the Poets' House in Portmuck, Northern Ireland, and in 1999 he received an Award for Literary Excellence from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. He is a professor of English at the University of Missouri, Columbia.

A Feeling of AND, a Feeling of OR

Sherod Santos, 1948

The window in mid-summer raised, and where
the screen intersects with the frame, a web of circular
tensile silks radiating outward from the central lair
where a yellow spiny-backed spider waits, its six
thorn spurs protruding rose-like from its abdomen,
its casing imprinted with a wax seal ring. Attached
to the foundation lines, clusters of white cottony tufts,
lures, I suppose, for insects, and suspended
from a single thread, a much smaller egg-shaped
spider (the male?) swaying imperceptibly in the air:
an image from childhood that reminds me of "childhood,"
a word that so often crosses my mind that it long ago
ceased to mean anything other than a period of time
when things occurred not to me so much as him,
and all of them linked only by AND. As in the span
of a single moment, the afternoon after the all-clear
when the sun rose on a bloated, fly-stung pygmy goat
in a gravel slough he crossed to wave to a woman
with a Red Cross band on her arm. AND: the red
pinball bumper cap ("5000 when lit") in a tented
arcade on Brighton Pier when he was twelve.

Sherod Santos

by this poet

Having slept in a turnout in the backseat
of her car, she awoke before dawn, shivering,
hungover, unsure of where she was.
To her surprise, the sodium lights on the billboard
she had parked beside were no longer on.
Wind gusts, the smell of rain, the raw, unbroken
landscape like a field of ice. If this had

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The window in mid-summer raised, and where
the screen intersects with the frame, a web of circular
tensile silks radiating outward from the central lair
where a yellow spiny-backed spider waits, its six
thorn spurs protruding rose-like from its abdomen,
its casing imprinted with a wax

The window in mid-summer raised, and where
the screen intersects with the frame, a web of circular
tensile silks radiating outward from the central lair
where a yellow spiny-backed spider waits, its six
thorn spurs protruding rose-like from its abdomen,
its casing imprinted with a wax

The window in mid-summer raised, and where
the screen intersects with the frame, a web of circular
tensile silks radiating outward from the central lair
where a yellow spiny-backed spider waits, its six
thorn spurs protruding rose-like from its abdomen,
its casing imprinted with a wax